Baudelaire in China (eBook)

The book examines the reception of Baudelaire in China by translators, critics, scholars, and individual writers. It reveals not only the protean qualities of Baudelaire’s work, but developments and trends in Chinese poetry, literary history, and criticism, as well as political and historical context throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

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Baudelaires work entered China in the twentieth century amidst political and social upheavals accompanied by a literary revolution that called for classical models and modes of expression to be replaced by vernacular language and contemporary content. Chinese writers welcomed their meeting with the West and openly embraced Western literature as providing models in developing their new literature. Baudelaires reception in China provides a representative study of this meeting of East and west. His work, which has been declared to stand between tradition and modernity, also lies at the intersection between classical and modern literature in China. Many of the best known and most highly regarded writers in twentieth-century China were drawn to Baudelaires work, and some addressed it directly in their own writings. Bien draws upon H.R. Jausss theory of the shifting and expanding horizons of expectation in the reading and interpretation of a literary work, and upon James J.Y. Lins notion of worlds received and created by both author and reader, to show how poetic lines, images, and ideas, as well as Chinese critics comments, eventually weave into a rich picture of Baudelaires reception in China.